The cat had been behaving itself – so far. Okay, the little pest had run off with my tea-cosy earlier in the day and wouldn’t say where it had left the bloody thing but, as abductions go, this was one that could be easily shrugged off, unlike others one could mention or obsess about.
For now though, the beast had boldly buggered off to wherever felines go who’d just destroyed another breakfast - no doubt to do other unspeakable things of a pathologically anatomical nature. It is a cat thing: to be nature’s cordless, battery free shredder.
If mankind could tap into the boundless energy resources cats use for their petty acts of wanton cruelty, murder and dissection, Al Gore would have to find yet another job.
The girlfriend, in the meantime, had gone off to do some touristy things, involving the climbing of long-suffering towers, watching bad cases of eczema craquelé on worthy if slightly senile paintings and doing other cultural things I tend to avoid like deserts avoid rain.
Not that I had had to do anything special to be excused from the girlfriend’s cultural city tour. Ever since I’d got us kicked out of Prague’s National Theatre (something to do with a defunct cat carrier, a half-eaten bacon & egg sandwich and a hair-trigger cloakroom attendant – don’t ask…) I’d received a universal pass card on all future expeditions of a cultural nature.
She had left me a little something to remember her by, while she was gone: a scribbled note, explaining why she’d left so early this morning – and the advice to read a certain Times online article, which introduced fifteen new reasons not to marry.
Then again, she’d also left me with another internet link, accompanied with a nicely smudged lipstick heart, three sprawling X’s and the words ‘There’s always hope.’Â Talk about mixed messages…
Ah well, like Neruda wrote:
But I hear only your voice, your voice
soars with the zing and precision of an arrow,
it drops with the gravity of rain,
your voice scatters the highest swords
and returns with its cargo of violets:
it accompanies me through the sky.
Anyway, it was quite nice to have the place to myself again for a bit. Like the cat, I am a solitary creature at heart.
Unlike the cat though, I do like my peace and quiet without much bloodshed or the tortured wailing of all creatures, great and small - and unlike the cat…
Prrrt...
Oh, bugger.
Prrrt…!!!
“What do you want?” I asked.
Prrrt went the cat, who’d dropped a vaguely familiar looking piece of cloth on the floor, before it started to wash itself in a none too vague, disgustingly self-satisfied manner.
“What…?!” I asked again.
Then I picked up the piece of cloth, inspected it real close and sighed.
“Please tell me you didn’t…” I said.
Prrrt did the cat.
“If someone followed you back,” I warned, “you are on your own. I don’t know you; I haven’t seen you before – and besides, I’m allergic to cats.”
Prrrt.
“Some cats just catch the occasional, average spider, you know - the little ones; the normal ones…”
“Boring.” spoke the cat and then left through the huff side of the cat flap, to go and annoy the shit out of the rest of the world again.
“Bloody Hell.” I whispered, still holding the piece of cloth – which was, I now saw, alarmingly bloodied.
It had most definitely been in the wars.
“I do hope they managed to wrap up most of the movie before that bloody cat arrived to mangle poor Spidey,” I spoke to a mostly deeply uncaring world.
Ah well, it was something to tell the girlfriend, when she came back from great cultural height.
As news items go, it wasn’t quite up there with the death of monarchs, minor wars or the devastation of cash crop harvests but it would serve well enough as a topic to raise and digest over our tea and biscuits.
Still, my world - and the world at large - might become a much more peaceful place, if I had my next tea-cosy made out of very domestic material indeed.
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